Diamond in the Rough

Back in the Fifties, when games were played at "Sticker Stadium," Little League baseball meant putting your life on the foul line.

By Phillip Parotti

Recently, I drove out to "Sticker Stadium," or what used to be. The Silver City Wal-Mart's parking lot now tops that old, caliche baseball field, burying it deep; the asphalt is no harder than the caliche used to be, but it has the single advantage that it does not sprout stickers. Before Wal-Mart moved up the hill and expanded, the "old" Sheriff's Posse Rodeo Arena occupied the site for decades (the really old Rodeo Arena, you will understand, was located at the corner of Swan and Pine, where one now finds the Army Reserve Center, right next to the old golf course, which is where Stout School is situated). But we are talking about baseball, and back in "the olden days," right after Babe Ruth died, the spot where Wal-Mart now stands was barren ground.

The author's team. Standing, from left: Nim Evatt, batboy Alfred Ogas, Billy Littlefield, (unknown) Parra, Gary Tatsch, "Pep" Parotti, Dean Wygant. Sitting, from left: Bobby Ogas, Bob Ruiz, Dick Siemer, Bartum Bynum, Larry Green, Billy Arnspiger.

Youth baseball in those days was, as I recall, largely unorganized, a matter of pick-up games played during summers, either on the Black Street Playground or on the empty block where Wells Fargo Bank has been built. At the northwest corner of that block, a primitive backstop had been raised, and at irregular intervals, pick-up softball games came together, some of them overseen by a recreation supervisor, usually a college student, given summer employment by the city. There may have been a "Junior League" hardball arrangement for youths 16 and older; I remember hearing talk about such teams, but no one that I knew had ever seen one of their games. So, in so far as my recollections will take me, that was pretty much the state of youth baseball in Silver City from 1948-1951.

But then, fairly quickly, things changed. In 1951, a few enterprising fathers launched a Cub Scout Softball League, and throughout the spring of that year, those of us in the right age bracket had a whale of a good time playing two or three softball games per week against the collapsing backstop at the corner of 13th and Grant. At the time, Silver City numbered enough Cub Scout Packs so that Packs and Dens could be pitted against one another, but our understanding of the game was so primitive as to be laughable.

Few of us had ever seen serious baseball played anywhere; in those days, television had not yet reached Silver City, and the nearest Major League baseball teams were located in St. Louis. So many of us played without gloves, and when gloves were finally introduced, I remember that I had a devil of a time convincing my father that I was going to be at a disadvantage without one. That season in particular, I would have to look back on as golden because as fielders, all of us were so inept that almost every solid hit turned into a home run, on errors. Because I could connect with the ball, I seemed to manage a couple of homers in every game. This, of course, led to false expectations about one's future in the game, expectations that were swiftly dashed in the spring of 1952 when "Little League Baseball" finally came to Silver City and we found ourselves playing hardball. That is when I learned that I was not going to be called up as a replacement for the Babe.

At some point during that year, the city fathers must have budgeted money to support Little League because, miraculously, beneath what is now Wal-Mart's parking lot, "Sticker Stadium" appeared, with a brand-new backstop and a couple of dugouts. "Sticker Stadium" was never an official name; for reasons that will become apparent, "Sticker Stadium" was merely the only name that anyone ever used to describe the field. Those of us who played there thought at the time that it was the latest development in modern stadium design; in truth, it was a dusty, forbidding challenge covered with loose rocks, tumbleweeds and ubiquitous goat-head stickers upon which, today, I rather imagine that no parent would allow a child to play. Later, when we were grown and gone, when we had played or seen the game played on grass and knew the game better, we began to take a little pride in having endured what we endured on that field. But back in the olden days, when we were all so very young, Sticker Stadium was aces, and we all felt important when we ran onto the diamond.

During the 1952 season, Little League in Silver City was made up, I think, of about eight teams. I played for Household Appliance; Silver City Recreation won the championship. Furthermore, the league must actually have been a Grant County league because I can remember that we played games against Santa Rita, Fort Bayard (including boys from Central and Bayard) and Hurley on a regular basis. Unlike the previous year in Cub Scout softball, we saw very few home runs, and the hardball we played seemed as hard as baseball could be.

Out on what Silver City writer Gladys Swan has called "The Edge of the Desert," where all our games were played at night, temperatures dipped as soon as the sun set; then the wind came up, and in those days, most of the streets in Silver City were still unpaved. Across the four years of my Little League and Pony League "career," I can recall no game in which dust—thick, stinging dust laced with sharp sand—did not play a significant role. I'm talking about serious dust here, flying sand so thick that games were often delayed and wind so fierce on that hill that it could turn a ball 40 or 50 degrees in flight. To keep the dust down, the city sometimes sprinkled the field, but a sprinkler truck could not damp down the surrounding plain or turn back the clouds of dust blowing up from town.

Sometimes, when I was playing in the outfield, I lost sight of my infield, and when called in to catch or play first base, I had trouble seeing my outfielders. Those seemed the standard conditions of play. Frequently, non-standard conditions developed in the form of vicious whirlwinds, dust devils so strong that they sent planks, cardboard boxes and discarded sheets of loose galvanized tin flying through the air over our heads. Our only defense against all of this was to hunch our backs, squint and hold our baseball gloves over our heads. In those days, such annoyances seemed . . . well, routine in Silver City; by today's measure, they were decidedly dangerous. But there were other dangers as well, and at the time, those seemed far more significant.

Going up to bat at Sticker Stadium seemed almost heroic, and I mean that in the Classical sense; like many of the young warriors at Troy, most of us felt we were facing certain death. In Little League, the pitchers were as wild as sin; in Pony League, they were merely as uncontrolled as vice. On average, I seem to remember being hit about once for every four times at bat, with the option for a second beaning in the event that our team ran up a large lead. Conspiracy theory being as ancient as stone, each of us knew absolutely that the opposing pitchers—the tallest, strongest, most intimidating kids in town—were trying to hit us on purpose, so swinging the bat was often more a matter of self-defense than reasoned placement, and "all pitchers were bullies" (except ours, of course, who were really nice guys and trying to do their best). My hopes for bettering Babe Ruth's record in the Major Leagues disappeared in a flash; I hit only one home run during the entire season—my last during any season—and I only managed that one because the ball rolled off the edge of Fort Bayard's unfenced field, disappeared behind the lights, and became lost in tall grass.

If batting was dangerous at Sticker Stadium, fielding was positively deadly and almost always painful. Fly balls, even when we had to chase them across two field positions to catch them because the Bear Mountain winds were turning them in the air, we might have considered to be the meringues and eclairs of life. If we could get the wind at our backs, we knew we were home free. But the hits that terrified us were the hard-hit grounders.

As I write this, I admit not to having had a baseball in my hands for decades. No matter: I can well remember them coming straight toward me across that hard caliche, whirling like wasps, zinging like gunshots, bouncing like cue balls, losing none of their weight, force or speed across the full distance from the plate to the fence. At the plate, one had an even chance of dodging a bean ball, but out in the field, one had no chance whatsoever of avoiding the hard-hit ball that struck a rock, took an instantaneous bounce, and smashed with destructive force into head, face, neck or chest before one could even hope to raise a glove in defense.

Maintaining one's concentration on a Sticker Stadium grounder was something like the ultimate test of a boy's courage in those days, because that caliche was covered by 10 billion little rocks offering a 75 percent chance that one was going to be hit hard enough by a bad bounce to bleed or bruise. Those rocks made Sticker Stadium baseball one of the most imperfect games known to man, and if one lucked out, avoided being hit, and fielded the grounder, one was not yet clear of pain—because the chances were that the ball would be coated with goat-head stickers, several of which were going to go right into the fingers the minute one tried to throw the ball to the plate. Let it suffice to say that the managers waited for us in the dugout with tweezers and that if playing ball at Sticker Stadium was a matter of sport, it was also, all too often, a matter of shedding blood. After my 14th birthday, when I finally exceeded the age limit for youth baseball in Silver City, I found that I was not entirely sorry to hang up my glove.

Three years later, when I came out of "retirement" to play American Legion baseball during a sojourn in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, I didn't recognize the game. Baseball was not a high school sport in Illinois, so I hadn't planned to play at all, but when faced with the fact that all of my friends played American Legion ball during the summer, I tried out, made the team, and had one of the great experiences of my life. Baseball in Illinois was played on grass (unimpeded by rocks), and played during the day. Pitchers had sound control and actually tried to hurl the ball over the plate, and grounders—none of them filled with stickers—never hit rocks and were almost dead balls by the time they reached the outfield.

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Suddenly, the world began to seem a rational place, so that year's play in Illinois left me with a lasting love for the game. But to tell the truth, after a little reflection, the season spent on those perfect, grassed fields in Illinois now seems a little like time spent in La-La Land; for the various vicissitudes that life throws in one's way, Sticker Stadium was probably a much better, much more realistic training ground.

Recently, following my retirement and return to Silver City, I made my first visit to the Senator Benny Altamirano Sports Complex. It is a beautiful facility, a fine tribute to a fine man, and I can only congratulate the many people who must have worked so very hard to bring it into being. I plan to get out to see a game or two during the coming year, and when I do, I know that I am going to sit in the stands, watch baseball being played as it should be played by the youth of Grant County, and recognize how very far Silver City has come since the days when Sticker Stadium was considered to be state of the art.

But at the same time, I recognize that I am also going to watch our young people exercising their skills on those gorgeous new fields and know in my bones that none of them will ever know what they missed by not being around in the Fifties.

Phil Parotti grew up in Silver City during the Forties and the Fifties and has recently retired and come home after
a long teaching career at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

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